University of Manchester group developing robots for nuclear decommissioning; creators of Latro spider robot and AVEXIS submersible for Sellafield inspection.
The Robotics for Extreme Environments Group (REEG) is a research theme within the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester. The group's core mission is to develop robotic systems capable of exploration and manipulation in environments that are hazardous or inaccessible to humans, with nuclear decommissioning as its primary application domain.
The group is led by Professor Barry Lennox and includes researchers from the Schools of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE), and Computer Science (CS). It operates three laboratories: two on the Manchester campus in the Nancy Rothwell Building on Oxford Road, and the Robotics for Extreme Environments Lab (REEL) in Whitehaven, West Cumbria, co-located with the Dalton Cumbrian Facility and adjacent to the Sellafield nuclear site. REEL houses a large warehouse test space, robot platforms, a Vicon positioning system, and radiation detectors.
Notable robotic platforms developed by the group include: Latro, a spider-inspired robot for monitoring and decommissioning dry and wet nuclear storage facilities, capable of cutting, sorting, and retrieving material; MIRRAX, a mobile robot that enters facilities through a 150 mm access port, climbs steps, traverses rough terrain, and produces geometric and radiological maps; and AVEXIS, a submersible vehicle designed to inspect legacy nuclear storage ponds at Sellafield and under development for deployment at the Fukushima Daiichi site.
The group leads two EPSRC programme grants for Robotics in Nuclear Environments and maintains strong industrial partnerships with Sellafield Ltd, the National Nuclear Laboratory, GE Grid, and National Grid. Research areas include novel platform design, communications and localisation in GPS-denied environments, sensing and navigation under radiation, and multi-level autonomous control. The group's work is internationally recognised through publications in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and related journals.
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